How Do You Live With Yourself?

In The Alters, you manage a big wheely base on a distant, lifeless planet, overcoming alien anomalies to reach a rendezvous point before the sun rises. It carries 11-Bit Studios’ hallmarks: resource management, narrow time constraints, and an ever-approaching meteorological reckoning.

Where the Alters departs from Frostpunk and This War of Mine (both brilliant games), is through its cast. Aside from a few nebulous earth-bound contacts - each with their own agenda that never has Jan’s interests at heart - the game’s cast is one person: Jan Dolski. Or, more accurately, eleven Jan Dolskis.

In the Alters, your mission to find mysterious unknown element rapidium begins in disaster. Other than ship’s builder Jan, the crew is dead on arrival. What’s worse is that sunrise approaches, bringing with it radioactive death. Alone on this dead planet, Jan is coached through rapidium mining by ~~Amazon~~ uh AllyCorp’s representatives Lucas and Maxwell into building a cloning chamber and creating new versions of himself. Versions made from branching life paths, each with different skills. These “Alters” are both Jan and not Jan. They share milestones like first kisses, childhood bullies, and the same parents, but how they overcame these trials differs, and the way the lessons they learned changed them.

Each Jan is an individual character and story arc, and while eleven different Jans exist, you can only bring in six, two of which are mandated by the game. Also, they play off each other, commenting and offering advice or potential solutions for each Jan’s problems, and life lessons for Jan Prime. Jan Miner, as he’s known, was a huge boon to my materials output and base construction, but his personal quest was a fascinating nightmare to resolve. By the end, I felt a deep attachment to that Alter in particular, but your play-through might not include Jan Miner at all.

Both Piotr Musial’s soundtrack and the game’s sound effects are excellent. The big distorted chords of nearby rapidium are haunting and beautiful, putting the player in mind of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The mysterious anomalies are elegant and alien, and when the music reaches its crescendos, it feels sincerely incredible. It is a triumph of 11-Bit and voice actor Alex Jordan that each Jan looks, sounds, and acts uniquely. I can hear two Jans argue in a distant room and instantly know which two it is, without even seeing them.

And argue they will. The problem with Jan is that he is a multitude of cantankerous egotists, and each of them wants something different. Pleasing one Jan will piss off another, and while I described this game as a management sim, you’ll spend more time managing people than resources.

11-Bit doesn’t shy away from the moral implications of its setting. Of bringing Alters into a world where their lived experiences never happened. The Jans clash over Jan Prime’s decision, angry they’ve been brought into a doomed plight against their will, just to save his Jan Prime’s life. But it’s not all gloom. The Jans’ different outlooks provide teachable moments to Jan Prime, who learns to be a better person from each of them.

The Alters is a fine 20-hour title that shakes itself up and reinvents its premise enough to keep itself interesting until the credits rolled. I got an ending. I wouldn’t describe it as the good ending, or the bad one, but it was *my ending*. It was the sum of my choices, and I didn’t feel cheated out of it. I knew the consequences of my actions; I made an informed choice, and I will live with that, proud of making the best I could from the cards dealt to me.

The Alters is a game of tough decisions and rich characters, who felt like friends by the end. It feels like the triumphant culmination of a long line throughout 11-Bit’s work. I loved it, and I consider it the second best game I’ve played this year, and this was a year packed with good games. It’s available on Game Pass right now, but if not it’s more than worth a play. And afterwards, let me know how the Alters saved your Jan, and how your game differed from mine.